LITTLE ROCK (AP) — Arkansas Department of Human Services officials on Friday said they did not find any cases of fraud among $1.3 million in Medicaid payments to providers that legislative auditors cited over a lack of adequate documentation.

The questioned payments were included a report presented to the Legislative Joint Auditing Committee reviewing the $8.6 billion in federal funds Arkansas received for the fiscal year that ended in June 2012. The questioned payments were among $231 million made to home and community based services provided by the program for the elderly and disabled.

State DHS officials said they reviewed the payments and found that all of the services reported had been delivered.

“We don’t dispute that there was a document that didn’t have a signature on it,” Tommy Carlisle, chief financial officer for the state’s Medicaid program, told the committee. “We dispute that it was an improper payment to that provider and we’ve got lots of redundancies to make sure that we are trying to give quality care to that.”

DHS officials told the panel that they would provide training to service providers so they will have the adequate documentation needed to confirm that services are being provided. State Medicaid Director Andy Allison said the problem is requiring that documentation without discouraging home and community-based providers.

“We believe the documentation requirements are heavy. It’s a dilemma,” State Medicaid Director Andy Allison told the committee. “We have a very high volume of service being provided by relatively low-wage providers in many cases, not in all cases.”

The audit was released as Arkansas is preparing to launch an independent Inspector General’s office to investigate complaints of waste, fraud and abuse in the state’s $5 billion Medicaid program.

The new office, which launches July 1, is part of a series of efforts aimed at curbing costs in Medicaid and was approved in conjunction with a plan to expand health insurance to thousands of low-income residents. The office will be led by an inspector general appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Senate.

“I think a lot of the things we’re talking about in terms of looking at, I think we’re going to be set up in a structural capacity for these things to be looked at in a way where you don’t have program integrity functions operating within the agency,” said Sen. David Sanders, R-Little Rock, who sponsored the legislation setting up the IG office.